Chapter 7
CHAPTER 7
A rcher
I don’t know what to make of the woman who’s been trailing after me like a lab assistant, writing down notes in my book as I drop samples of grapes into plastic baggies.
We’ve moved from the vineyard closest to the tasting room and the kitchen garden to the most distant parcel of vines on the Buttercup Hill property. I normally hop in my truck to come out here, but Ella insisted she didn’t mind walking the mile to get out here. Maybe she wants to get her steps in or something.
Once again, I didn’t have time for my workout, so I don’t entirely mind walking the vineyards on foot. The stack of papers in my office moves to the back of my mind as I inhale a few deep breaths of fresh air. That’s the reason I go out for my daily run—to remember to breathe deeper than I do when I’m indoors at my desk.
The sky is that impossible blue color that looks like it came from a box of crayons, somewhere between pale blue and periwinkle. Not a cloud anywhere. The tops of the oak trees sway in the breeze, but otherwise, the air is still. All I see for a clear mile in any direction is rows of grapevines laden with dark purple cabernet grapes, some of the best in Napa.
The vines are so heavy with fruit that some list forward as if begging to be relieved of the weight. I’ve been over here every day for the past week, plucking grapes and taking them back to the lab outside the wine cellar. And each day, I end up deciding the grapes aren’t quite ready for picking. So the vines take in a little more sun, pull in a little more water from their deep roots. And I come back, thinking maybe today’s the day.
“You’re going to let me see the lab, right?” Ella says, squinting up from the notebook and not bothering to shade her eyes from the strong mid-morning sun. In every direction, rows of cabernet vines span out on trellises. Guests at Buttercup Hill never come out here, which is why it’s one of my favorite places on the property. The only sounds are birds and the distant hum of cars on Silverado Trail. Now I regret mentioning that we have a lab. This woman doesn’t miss a thing.
“Don’t you have places to be today?” I ask.
She grins. “Nope. No place better than this.”
I half expected her to get bored after twenty minutes of walking down yet another row of vines and waiting for me to choose a solitary grape to test. I also half hoped she’d decide that having her wedding here might be more trouble than it’s worth once she saw that it’s basically farmwork everywhere except the inn and restaurant where Beatrix throws the most elegant events in three counties.
If anything, she seems more invested now.
I slap a hand across the back of my neck, which feels hot in the blazing sun. I wish she was the irritating diva I expected because this woman, with her outsized enthusiasm for viticulture and her gawking interest in seeing my lab makes me almost like her, and there’s no point in that. After today, I don’t plan on seeing her again.
“I just hope I can read your chicken scratch,” I grumble, as she makes note of which land parcel and which type of grape I’ve just picked. I try to look over her shoulder to see what she’s written down, but she hides my own notebook from me as though I’m trying to cheat on an exam. It’s exasperating, and I wish I didn’t find it a little bit charming.
“Are most of the grapes here cabernet?” she asks, scribbling in the notebook. “It seems like about eighty percent of the ones you’ve picked are cabs.”
She’s not wrong. In fact, my plan today was to sample eighty percent cabernet grapes and twenty percent sauvignon blanc. “Lemme guess, back on that farm, someone taught you math?”
“Not on the farm. But I did manage to get a college degree, so percentages came into play somewhere along the way.” She saunters along beside me in her too-long pants and muddy boots which have picked up a layer of grass on the bottom.
She looks right at home out here, and I figure that her years of acting have given her that ability to blend into whatever setting she arrives in for a movie. I can picture her as an American ex-pat who lands in Tuscany without knowing a soul. She’s supposed to get married, but her fiancé dumps her. So she goes to Italy and takes the only job she can at a vineyard, falls in love with the son of the property owner. Some shit like that…
My brow instantly furrows when I notice her staring at me with a curious grin on her face. I wish I didn’t like the look of it because the last thing I need is to have any sort of interest in a woman at all. Let alone one who’s marrying another man. “What?” I gripe.
“You were smiling.”
“Was not.”
“Oh, yeah, you were.”
“Better get you out of the hot sun because you’re imagining things, darlin’.” I indicate she should walk back in the direction of the old brown barn, which we can’t really see in the distance because of the angle of the sun.
“I didn’t imagine a thing,” she says, her grin widening into a full smile. I don’t get out of the way in time because the force of that smile—her straight teeth with a tiny space between the front two, her pillowy lips coated in the palest pink gloss, the apples of her cheeks which frame her heart-shaped face—it just about does me in. “And I’m going to find out the reason for it, mark my words.”
Shaking my head, I turn away from her and head back toward the barn. No point in arguing. I just need to do a better job of keeping my thoughts to myself and stop imagining her falling in love in vineyards—in movies.
“For fuck’s sake,” I mutter, more to myself than at her. Looking over my shoulder to make sure she’s following, I see that she’s still smiling. Great. Gotta find the one person in the world who’s immune to my moods and have her trailing around after me like a puppy after a nap. Sounds about right for my luck.
She also seems unable or unwilling to stop talking. Her voice sounds like a goddamn song as she narrates our walk to the building with the fermentation tanks. “Are these oaks? I should know from the shape of the leaves, but I’ll admit I was kind of a Girl Scout dropout, so I don’t know my plants. I don’t picture you in a Boy Scout uniform, but I guess if you grow up in a place with plants and trees and nature, you don’t need to join a club to learn what’s what. So…are they oaks? I don’t see any acorns on the ground,” she twitters, somehow oblivious to the fact that I’m only punctuating her observations with the occasional grunt.
“Yes. Oaks.”
“Ah, so I haven’t lost all the farm girl in me.” I sneak a look in her direction and see the blissed-out joy she seems to feel just being here. I used to feel the same way when it felt like being here was a choice, not a family obligation .
After twenty minutes of her yammering on with that silky voice, we reach the lab. I hold the door open and motion for her to walk inside.
“Ooh, I feel like I’m being invited into the inner sanctum,” she whispers, stepping quietly so the boots don’t make noise on the cement floor.
“I’m still not sure why I agreed to show you all this,” I say, and it’s the God’s honest truth. I’m not in the practice of bringing guests to the lab to show them how I determine when the grapes are ready to be picked. Sure, there are probably some who’d get a kick out of knowing the inner workings of Buttercup Hill, but we keep a tight wrap on what’s open to the public and what’s kept behind closed doors. Any competitor could come on a wine-tasting tour and learn far too much about our process if we let just anyone peek behind the screen.
“Because I asked nicely,” she says, eyes darting around the room. I watch her take in the clean white countertops, the assorted beakers and pipettes on neat shelves, the microscopes that make the place look like a science classroom. Ella studies the large wall where a map shows all of our vineyards, marked in different colors depending on what types of grapes are grown there. Next to that, whiteboards have lists of which grapes have been picked already and where they are now—the casks and barrels where they’re fermenting.
Ella takes it all in as I pull out the small plastic bags from the larger burlap bag. She doesn’t ask questions, making me think the way everything is laid out is self-explanatory. That fills me with an odd sense of pride, even though I shouldn’t give a rat’s ass what she thinks.
“Can I have my notebook?”
She opens it to the page where she’s neatly written down everything I rattled off in the vineyards, all the numbers and names that correspond to the grapes in the bags. I look it over and nod .
“Did I do okay, Grumpy Grape?”
“Don’t call me that.” I look over her list and take the first grapes out of their bags and drop them into test tubes. I use a glass rod to crush the grapes. Standing close to me, she watches over my shoulder, like a student memorizing every step in order to get an A.
“Deal, as long as you explain what you’re doing.” She leans on the counter and folds her hands under her chin. “We’re measuring Brix, right?”
I turn my head, surprised. “Yeah. How do you know about Brix?” I find her face inches from mine. The rush of heat I feel in my chest startles me and my eyes dart to hers. I never expected to find a woman’s wine knowledge such a turn on.
We stand frozen for a beat, something passing between us that I can’t identify. I clear my throat and glance away from the intensity of her gaze.
I pull two rolling stools over and place them a foot apart from each other. We each take a seat.
She shrugs. “Doesn’t everyone? One degree of Brix is one gram of sugar per hundred milliliters of solution. What’s the solution?” She cocks her head with such a matter-of-fact look of boredom that I almost think that everyone does know what Brix means. But…no.
Cocking my head to the side, I return her stare, my eyes tracing the lines of her face while I wait. By the time they land on her lips, she flinches. “Fine. I did some research. I’m kind of a science nerd, you might as well know.”
None of this tracks with what I know about Ella Fieldstone the actress, which is admittedly not much. I have to own the fact that I’ve made some sweeping generalizations about her based on one interaction with her and the splashy gossip rag stories no one can avoid without living in a cave.
“You are?”
“Totally. ”
I nod, brow furrowing again as I turn back to the test tubes. “So if you already know about Brix, why are we here?”
“Oh, well, I read up on wine making a little bit, but only the broad strokes. There’s nothing like seeing it in person.”
“And you require this in order to pick wines for your wedding?” I’m still not understanding why this whole charade is necessary to throw a few bottles of cabernet at her guests. We have many vintages of wine at Buttercup Hill, but knowing about Brix doesn’t make them a better pairing with fish or meat.
“Not exactly. The wedding part is a party. But this—getting to spend time here learning about how everything works, getting down into the science of wine, that’s what gets my juices flowing. It’s what’ll make the rest of the wedding planning bearable, just between you and me.”
There’s so much to unpack. She isn’t excited about the wedding planning? It flies in the face of nearly everything I know about engaged couples and destination weddings. And her. I took a deep dive into social media and found way too many instances of her crowing about her wedding to that country star.
But before I can broach the subject of why she needs to make wedding planning more bearable, a veil of concern drops over her face. She waves her hands between us. “Please forget I said that. I’m excited about the wedding. And the planning. I’m just…like I said, I like science more. Got a little carried away, is all.”
Wheeling my stool a few feet away, I cross my arms and take her in, confounded by the study in contrasts.
“You find the wedding planning unbearable?” I can’t let it go.
“Forget. It.”
“I can’t.”
“That’s your problem, not mine.” Her mouth forms a stiff line, and all her prior joy disappears behind a mask of seriousness.
I wait, thinking maybe she’ll reconsider and spill some tea if I give her the opening. Some people are uncomfortable enough with silence that they talk just to fill it. I’m not one of them. Apparently, neither is she.
“Fine.” I open a drawer in the lab table. “This is a refractometer. Should I bother telling you what it does, or do you already know?”
Her stoic expression cracks slightly but I don’t get anywhere close to a smile. “You should tell me.”
“It measures the sugar levels. The Brix. I’m looking for something between fourteen and sixteen.”
Her eyes blaze to life. “Cool.”
“Yeah? Is that a science nerd term?”
She shrugs. “It does the job. Do you have a sense just by tasting them, or is it hard to tell?”
“Depends. I should’ve taken a few grapes of each sample so you could taste them before I put them under the refractometer.” Out in the vineyards, I was just trying to get my job done and get rid of my inquisitive sidekick, but her interest is reminding me of the few things I like about this job.
“Next time.”
I shoot her a side-eye. “This is the one and only time. We had a deal, remember?”
“We’ll see about that,” she says, standing from her stool. The swiveling seat moves along with her and she grabs the lab table with both hands to steady herself, but the motion sends her tipping toward me. I steady her with a hand on her shoulder, acutely aware of the warmth of her skin and the fact that I don’t want to let go yet. She looks down at my steady grip and up at me. Her eyes are unreadable, but her lips part and she lets out a quiet exhale that sounds like a sigh.
“You okay there?”
“Fine as fuck.” She swallows and blinks a few times.
I suppress a smile. She’s an unfiltered, slightly clumsy nerd. I like it .
Her breath hitches when I remove my hand, and she stays there, still as a stone. Then she licks her goddamn lips.
Our faces are inches apart. It would be so easy to lean closer, to taste those lips I’ve been staring at all morning. But I’m not about to make a pass at an engaged woman.
“When’s your wedding date?” I rasp. She startles and backs away.
“April ninth.” A rendition of “Here Comes the Sun” starts playing in her purse, and she fishes around in the oversized blue bag. “Speak of the devil,” she says, letting out a sigh that seems directed at her phone.
She answers the phone by punching at it with her index finger. “Hi, Callum…yeah. Hold on— what ?... We need to talk about this… Okay, sure…I’m coming.” She hangs up and shoves the phone back into her purse. I pick up the next test tube, but she shakes her head. “I can’t do this now. I’m sorry.” Her whole demeanor has shifted in a matter of seconds. Her smile disappears. The sparkle of interest in her eyes is gone. “I have to go.”
Before I can ask her anything, she’s moving for the door. Doesn’t matter. There’s no way I’m leaving that conversation unfinished, even if I have to dig into tabloid news to find out what she meant.
“Bye,” I call after her.
And she’s gone, leaving a cold void where there was warmth and joy a moment ago. Leaving me with a sense that everything I thought I knew about life has changed, even if I can’t say exactly how. But now that she’s gone, the wild mess of her hair blowing in the breeze behind her as she heads toward the parking lot, all I can think is that I want her to come back.